Show Me Your Teeth
by Lorata
Summary: Hunger Games Holiday Exchange. Prompt: Cato/Glimmer/Marvel, "tell me you're dead and I'll love you even more". ("This is our time," Glimmer says. "We should take what we want.") They'd never do this in real life, but this the Arena.


Glimmer scrapes her nails down Cato's back, fingers skidding in blood. It might be his; it might be a dead tribute's, leftover from the bloodbath. It doesn't really matter. He fists his hand in her hair, yanks her head back and closes his teeth over her throat. Pain shoots through her and sings in her veins and Glimmer is alive, alive, alive. She grapples with him, tugs him and brings their mouths together in a clash of teeth that ends in a familiar sharp tang on her tongue.

Her hair sticks to her neck with crusted blood. Cato's fingers dig bruises into her pale arms. If they'd done this back in the Academy they'd both be in trouble - Cato would get a whipping until his legs collapsed underneath him; they'd throw Glimmer into a bath of ice until she screamed from the cold - but Cato isn't from One and Glimmer's not in the Academy anymore and none of it matters, nothing at all, because they're here now.

"Uh, guys?" It's the boy from Twelve, their trump card for the cameras, his voice nervous and awkward as his feet shuffle in the leaves on the ground, but Glimmer ignores him - _weak link, tool, toy, prey_ - and bites down on Cato's lip. "I just, maybe I should get some firewood."

It's Clove's voice next, bored and as flat as the blades of her knives. Likely she's flipping one in her fingers, doing her best to freak out Twelve as much as he pretends he's not. "I'll babysit Loverboy, you two have fun."

"'ppreciate it," Cato says, grinning over Glimmer's shoulder at Clove, and once they're gone - really gone, Glimmer might be playing this up for the cameras but she's a Career and so is he, and they wait, tense, until the footfalls fade for real - he tugs Glimmer into his lap, fingers hard against her hip. "You know you're dead," Cato says in her ear, low enough that the cameras may or may not catch it.

Glimmer digs her fingers into his throat, her nails breaking the skin. He hums, his adam's apple bobbing beneath her fingertips. She leans in close, letting the audience imagine what she might be whispering. "Is that supposed to be news? Odds are we're all dead. You know that as well as I do."

Cato pulls back just enough to look at her, his eyes wide and dark in the fading light. "Is that supposed to discourage me?" he asks her. She flattens her hand against his chest, feeling the double-thump of his heartbeat beneath her palm (a-_live, _a-_live_, a-_live_).

"This is our time," Glimmer says. "We should take what we want."

It's true. This is it - there is no after the Arena, not for her, and no matter who wins, not for any Career. They've spent their whole lives training for this - killing for this, bleeding for this, breaking bones and snapping necks and taking knives to the collarbone for this - and now this is the zenith. They are gods, and the Arena is their temple. Whatever happens after, it will never, ever compare to this. It's the one time where their entire universe will bend to their will, and across the nation, millions of people are watching, cheering.

It will end, but not yet. Not tonight.

They have, she estimates, ten days before the spell breaks. Ten days before the alliance breaks and it all falls apart, and the lucky ones among them will die in the dirt and the blood and the loser will go home to watch it all swirl down the drain in a haze of demands and drugs and smiles. That won't be Glimmer.

"Well, that's easy then," Cato says, and this is for the cameras, the hard, deliberate smirk and the flash in his eyes as he slides a hand up the back of her shirt and trails it down her spine. "Because I know what I want."

He doesn't want her, not really, just like Glimmer doesn't want him. If they were normal kids, meeting up after school somewhere, they would not be here, hands and teeth and blood and knives, would not be flaying each other open while the cameras devoured everything. They would flirt first, tease each other, maybe go out on a few stupid dates and feel each other up outside her door before her parents threatened to kill him. But they are here, and this isn't life. This is the Arena, and everything changes once the platforms rise and the countdown starts.

She kisses him while madness swirls in her mind, intoxicating and freeing. She's taken two lives in the Arena and won't stop there before she dies, and the hard truth of victory is that you pay back what it gives you but Glimmer isn't going to win and she'll never have to pay it back. Leave that to Cato or Clove or Marvel or the giant boy from Eleven or whichever one of them is stupid enough to think they're the exception.

Glimmer has always known exactly where she stands in life. It's much more liberating than the illusion of freedom.

She presses herself close against him and he groans into her mouth, but they don't go further, not yet. Because this is about them but it's not just for them, and they're both Careers and know how the game is played and who's watching. And so, Glimmer pulls back, bares her teeth at Cato in a feral grin. "How good's your control, Two-boy?" she asks him, rocking hard into his lap. "Want to make a wager?"

He chuckles, low and dark. "I'll leave that up to them," he says. He doesn't say who because he doesn't need to, and when you only have three weeks to live you don't waste time stating the obvious. "I think I'll just enjoy myself."

"Suit yourself." Glimmer winks, stretches once, giving the cameras a long look at the curve of her spine, then comes back and nips at his jaw. Cato works his hand up the front of her shirt this time, tugging her jacket from her shoulders and tossing it across the clearing.

He has her shirt half off and his mouth at her breast when a foot cracks over a twig. They freeze without looking like they notice, and Glimmer reaches for the knife strapped to her thigh even as Cato's fingers close around the sword lying at his feet, but they don't pull apart.

"It's just me," Marvel says in a dry voice. "Don't stop on my account."

Cato laughs, his mouth hot and wet against her skin, and Glimmer shoves him back and tugs her shirt back into place. He leans back on his hands, looking up at her with an amused expression as Glimmer stands up, spins around and looks at Marvel, sour-faced with a fresh bag of supplies from the Cornucopia. "What's the matter?" Glimmer asks him, sing-song, and she twirls her knife around her fingers. "You don't look like someone with three kills to him."

Marvel rolls his eyes and drops the goods by the fire. "Sorry, if I'd known you were going to make me lose my lunch, I wouldn't have bothered eating."

This time Cato laughs louder, sharp and challenging, and Marvel's gaze flicks to him. Glimmer never paid attention to Marvel in training - he was the runner up for the Arena while Glimmer was always, always first, and that meant Glimmer didn't bother while he would have been thrown out if he'd even come close to touching her. But then Luster took a spear to the head in training and that bumped Marvel back into the running, and he did everything short from actually bribing the trainers to make sure they chose him the second time.

Glimmer admires determination in anyone, but she especially understands the suicidal kind, the destructive urge to burn bright and fast rather than slowly fade away. "That's right, you were never allowed to touch me back home, were you," she says, and Marvel narrows his eyes. None of the boys were, but that hardly matters to him.

Marvel's jaw goes tight. "We're not back home now," he says, and it's a warning, curling somewhere between a threat and a promise. He takes a half-step forward, but he doesn't do it, doesn't take that extra leap and push himself over to irredeemable. The Capitol likes its villains but it likes them palatable, and no one who's ever raped another tribute in the Arena has made it past the next day.

Behind her, Cato gets to his feet, and his hands come up around her waist as he bends down and grazes his teeth across the join of her shoulder. Something sparks in Marvel's eyes and digs deep, and Glimmer lets her posture go loose. "No," she agrees. "We're not."

He wets his lips, and Glimmer lowers her gaze to his mouth to let him know she saw it. If they'd been normal kids in One, Glimmer would not even have looked at Marvel, too tall and too skinny for a Career, brimming with insecurity and the urge to prove himself no matter what it took, but they're not. She smiles. "Are you going to do anything about it? You could be a future victor. Act like one."

Marvel growls, and he crosses the distance between them in a few short strides. His hands find Glimmer's hair, her shirt, and he kisses her with all the desperation of a man attacking a banquet he never thought he'd get to attend. Glimmer hums and scrapes her fingers through his hair, letting him pull her flush against his hips.

It's interesting - intriguing, even. For Cato she's a game, a diversion, something to do as the world burns. For Marvel she's the prize.

After a while Cato grunts. "Hey, a guy's getting cold over here," he says, and he pushes Marvel aside but doesn't step in.

"Yeah?" Marvel says, his lip curled in a snarl. Tension hangs in the air like a downed wire. "What are you going to do about it?"

Glimmer tilts her head to the side, and she has no interest in being a pawn in this testosterone game but they could make it into something better. Cato catches her gaze, and then he sweeps his over Marvel, experimental. "Hm," Cato says. "Depends."

It takes Marvel a second, but then he steps back. "No way, I'm not into that."

Cato raises an eyebrow. "You sure about that? Because this is the Arena. You can be into anything you want to be."

Back in the Academy even hinting at that would get a boy's head shoved in a toilet; the ghosts of years of hazing - either as victim or perpetrator, Glimmer can't tell - dance in Marvel's eyes, but he takes the challenge, and his eyes rake up and down Cato like knives. "I guess the question is, are you worth it? I don't switch teams for just anybody."

Cato bares his teeth. "Are _you_?" Glimmer steps aside as Cato moves in close, and he and Marvel are almost eye to eye and he uses that to speak so the cameras will miss it. "We're dead, all of us. I wouldn't get picky now if I were you."

Marvel hisses in a breath, but then he fists his hands in Cato's shirt and now they're kissing and grappling and shoving each other back against the tree trunks while Glimmer stands back and watches. Cato gets his massive hands around Marvel's wrists and slams his arms above his head, and Marvel allows that for all of three seconds before biting down hard on Cato's tongue and using his moment of surprise to break free.

It's hot and primal and snarls itself deep in Glimmer's gut. "Boys," she calls out in a sing-song, and they break apart, chests heaving. "I think you've forgotten something."

Cato grins at her. "Sorry," he says, looping an arm around her waist and tugging her in close. Marvel's hands settle at her hips, hesitant for just a second before his grip tightens. "They don't exactly cover this in school."

Glimmer's laugh cracks for a second because for girls in District One they do - any girl who makes it to fifteen at the Academy has to learn so she can be worth the investment once she graduates - but that's not real, not anymore. It's not going to happen, and it doesn't matter.

It's a mess after that, confusing and sloppy and _alive_, and Glimmer loses track of whose fingers slide inside her while fire arcs through her body; who laughs in triumph when she cries out; whose mouth leaves a searing trail across her shoulder; whose chest she presses her forehead against while the two of them kiss above her. All around them the cameras soak up every detail while the audience cranes forward in their seats - she can see them now, the breathless Capitol citizens, touching themselves to climax in their padded armchairs in their giant, flashy homes while teenagers rut for their enjoyment.

Except it's all a joke, because Glimmer couldn't care less about the audience anymore. It's not for them. It's for her, and the two dead boys walking on either side of her, and every camera could explode and it wouldn't matter. This is their moment, whether there's no one or a million people watching.

At last they lie in a boneless heap, clothes askew and half tugged back into place, and they don't cuddle or soften against each other - there are no rules when you're about to die except one, and Glimmer will not break it for anything - but the air is different. It's thick with silent understanding, and they might all die tomorrow - the Arena could explode in a volcano, or a flood, or an earthquake - but they did this, and that's what's important.

They all reach for a weapon before Clove and Twelve reach them, though that's not hard with Twelve crashing through the underbrush like a giant cow. "You guys are disgusting," Clove says, tossing down her armful of firewood, but it doesn't take that long to collect a few branches and twigs, and Glimmer will thank her with a quick death if it's up to her. "The whole clearing smells like sex."

Glimmer laughs, and she sits up and pulls her shirt back on with exaggerated slowness just to watch the mix of horror and confused, unwilling arousal on Twelve's face. "Do you think we'll get marshmallows if we ask nicely?" she says, tilting her face up to the cameras. "I wouldn't mind a cookout."

Cato sits beside her on the log and drapes his arm around her waist. Marvel sits across from him, but at last the burning jealousy, the unrelenting need to prove himself, has faded for now. "I should hope so," he says, teeth glinting in the dark. "We gave them a show. I'd say we deserve it."

* * *

She dies in the leaves in the cold grey light of pre-dawn, a thousand needles jabbing into her skin and injecting her with liquid pain. Glimmer screams - the agony is worse than she ever imagined, and she's trained all her life and told herself she's ready but she wasn't ready, not really, she was ready for death but not for _dying_ - and the world turns and sparks into thousands of colours as the venom hits her bloodstream.

Her hand morphs before her eyes, swollen and dripping with pus, and in her final moments Glimmer scrabbles through the sea of panic and scrambles onto the shore of peace. She did what she came here to do, and now she's dead, just like she planned it, and most importantly, it's over. She's dead and ugly and twisted and no one will ever want to use her corpse the way she stopped them from using her living body, it's done. She's done. No more.

No regrets. No regrets. No -

_Boom._

* * *

Cato and Marvel don't touch each other again, and that night, as they sit and nurse their stings, Marvel throws a stick on the fire. "It's the best she could've asked for," he says, quiet and traitorous. He knows what they'd do to him if they heard - except what can they do now? He's taken all the power from them. He shifts, twitching his collar up over his throat so the fabric rasps against the bruises she left on his skin. "I know she didn't really want to win."

Cato doesn't say anything, but he nods and tosses a green branch into the flames to watch it hiss and shrivel. As the leaves curl into blackness he looks up and meets Marvel's gaze, and Marvel gives him a grim smile. They managed one real moment inside a three-week circus of blood and death, and that's more than most can say. Marvel will be the victor - he has to, he didn't fight and bleed and kill to get this far only to fail - but even without that, they scored a point that the Gamemakers can't measure.

They sit in silence as her face floats across the sky, and it's neither respect nor regret as they gaze at her image, but it isn't _not_, either.


End file.
